Mamma Mia! How Indian pizzerias cracked global top 50 list | India News

When Amol Kumar started Leo’s in Delhi in the winter of 2016, his aim was to serve pizzas the way Italians made it. The vindication came when his Neapolitan-style pizzeria made it to the 50 Top Pizza Italia 2023 rankings along with Gurugram-based da Susy. Their rankings are 47 and 44 respectively, but it’s still quite a feat considering how prickly Italians are about preserving their culinary traditions. Kumar, who has worked with a family-owned pizzeria in Lecco near Lake Como in northern Italy, says Indians didn’t understand this style of pizza in those early years.

“Neapolitan-style pizza is soft in the centre; the slice is supposed to fall when you lift it to eat. But diners would complain it is soggy. ‘I want it crispy,’ they would insist. Characteristically, this kind of pizza is also charred in some spots, but people would think it’s burnt. Used to stronger flavours, customers would often ask if the sauce could be spicier. But we stuck to our guns. And look how things have changed. Everybody wants to open a Neapolitan-style pizzeria now,” says the 36-year-old, who hopes to diversify into Roman styles such as pizza al taglio (sold by the slice) or pizza tonda (round with an ultra-thin crust) in a new outlet.
It’s quite a change from the days when Indians had to choose from either the thick-crust, deep pan-pizza made by American chains or the desi ‘peeza’ loaded with tomato sauce, processed cheese and even mayo. Then came the thin-crust wood-fired boom, albeit with an assortment of Indianised toppings like chicken tikka, sweet corn, and paneer. Today, all the major metros have quite a few options that serve good hand-tossed Italian, New York style or Chicago deep dish pies. But it’s the art of Neapolitan pizza-making, which got Unesco heritage status six years ago, that is finally carving out a slice of India’s artisanal pie business. Kanishk Dhupad is co-founder of Lazy Leopard, a Neapolitan pizzeria and trattoria that opened last month in Chennai. “A Neapolitan pizza is one of the simplest yet hardest pizzas to make. Everything is in the details and the technique,” says Dhupad, whose restaurant does airy slow fermented pizzas.

“We are teaching India to stop sharing their pizza because a pizza born out of a long fermentation process is so light, you will stay hungry if you don’t eat an entire pie,” says Delhi-based, Neopolitan Susanna Di Cosimo who runs da Susy in Gurugram. Cosima is thrilled about making it to the Top 50, recounting how she received a confidential email in January, informing her that da Susy had been selected after “secret inspectors” from the Italian pizza guide anonymously visited her establishment in December. Settled in India for almost a decade now, it was during Covid that Cosima started her outlet with a table for one when her travel agency business took a beating. Da Susy has now grown into two outlets with an ever-growing list of fans.
Her restaurant website explains all the technicalities of ‘pizza napoletana’ – the cornicione or the rim should be light and airy, it has to be soft enough to be folded like a booklet (called ‘portafoglio’ in Italian), and air is pushed from the bottom of the dough into the borders. She says her Indian customers are very discerning. “They can detect the minutest variations. If I change the proportion of water from 65 to 63%, they will say the crust is a little chewy today,” she says. Cosimo sources all her ingredients from importers, including tomatoes from the Mt Vesuvian region, considered the best in the world. In 2016, fresh off Le Cordon Bleu in London, Anirudh Nopany started Brik Oven with his business partner at Bengaluru’s Church Street.
After working with commercial yeast for close to seven months in those early days, Nopany made his own sourdough starter from scratch. “While traditional Neapolitan pizza is made with yeast, there is something very appealing about sourdough aside from the fact that it doesn’t make you feel bloated. It’s your own culture and your own dough. It’s as unique as it gets,” says Nopany. Nopany’s seven-year sourdough starter culture is now used in seven outlets of Brik Oven across the city, with a new one in the offing. Ayush Jatia, whose Si Nonna’s serves sourdough pies in Mumbai, got his 500-year-old starter culture or the ‘mother dough’ from a multi-generational family in Naples, in addition to building an oven whose bottom is from the lava of Mt Vesuvius. Although his head chef is Italian, he has trained some 15 Indian pizzaiolos to toss out perfect sourdough pizzas.
“It’s a skill. You don’t need an Italian chef to make an authentic Neapolitan sourdough pizza,” says the London-based Jatia. Dhupad, a former advertising photographer, painstakingly created his locally sourced flour blend over nine months before the launch of Lazy Leopard. It mimics the finely ground doppio zero Italian flour but was adapted to suit Indian weather and water. “I have had some Italian chefs come in while I was developing my Neapolitan pizza. They went ‘Mamma Mia‘ so, I think my job is done,” he laughs.